Arlo Guthrie Interview: Folk Icon

By: Rick Landers

Photo Credit: Michael G. Stewart

Mention the name Arlo to most Boomers and immediately the song “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” comes to mind. That song alone would be a pretty darn good legacy.

But, Arlo Guthrie’s given us a lot more treasures over the years like “The Motorcycle Song,” “City of New Orleans,” “Deportee” and the counterculture tune “Coming into Los Angeles” he sang at Woodstock.

As the son of the legendary songwriter and chronicler of American life, Woody Guthrie, Arlo’s talents and inspiration spring from a very deep well. He’s carried his father’s legacy along a straight and narrow path keeping ripe the elder Guthrie’s spirited integrity while satirizing or poking fun at unbridled authority.

Landing on the music charts in 1967 with his debut album, Alice’s Restaurant, Guthrie quickly became a young icon of a turbulent decade. Nearly every year since Arlo’s laid down tracks on a long list of memorable albums such as Washington County, Hobo’s Lullaby and his highly acclaimed Amigo.

In 1991 Guthrie purchased the church that we’ve come to know as Alice’s Restaurant and converted it to the Guthrie Center. It’s now an inter-faith gathering spot in support of various community needs and serves as a place for fellow musicians to play. Guthrie will be the first to tell you that the place was never a restaurant.

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Rick: When you wrote “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” was that a long process or did it come to you in a stream of consciousness?

Arlo Guhrie: That actually took about a year to write. And I didn’t sit down and write it like you write a book. I had to live through the experiences one at a time and add them to the little song. That whole process took about a year. But that wasn’t like a song that I’d sit down and write a normal song.

Rick: As the son of Woody Guthrie, what did you think when Pete coined the term “Woody’s Children” for the folk artists of the ‘60s?

Arlo Guhrie: Well, I think he wasn’t talking genetically so much. He was talking philosophically. In other words, there were a lot of people who began to write songs that were not for the popular music charts or about the history of people who were engaged in the times. You know?

There’s different kinds of song writers obviously for different kinds of music. And both my dad and Pete really believed or felt that songs that had been handed down generation to generation, what we now call folk songs, was a very potent part of their understanding of their own history. And who they were, what happened to them and what their hopes and dreams were. Those kinds of songs that identify you and give you your history weren’t the kinds of songs people were writing and being played on the radio for the most part.

So anybody who was writing in that vein is who I think Pete was referring to. Because that’s what my dad did. He also wrote popular songs for popular music. It wasn’t that he was exclusive. It was only that he was not simply trying to be an entertainer. He was also trying to be a chronicler or a journalist of the times and add to this wealth of history that had been handed down in song for many generations.

Photo Credit: Michael G. Stewart

Rick: I understand Woody wrote 3,000 songs.

Arlo Guhrie: Well, I don’t know! We have 3,500 of them that don’t even have music to them! For the past ten or fifteen years, my sister Nora has been getting these lyrics out to musicians all over the world.

That’s why we have Billy Bragg and Wilco recording “Mermaid Avenue”. The Plasmatics just did a record of some of those songs that won them a Grammy last year. I just did a tour with a guy in Germany named Hans-Eckardt Wenzel who translated them into German. I mean it’s everywhere!

Rick: In the past folk music was a weapon that targeted inequality, the cruelty of war and other social causes. It had a tangible strength. Where is it today? Has it lost its voice or its audience?

Arlo Guhrie: A lot of people confuse folk music with being a genre. It’s really not. What it is, it’s the way that people learn the music they’re playing. When you study it in school or when you read it in a book or take a course in it or when you can write it in music notation that’s generally on the classical side of things and that’s a great tradition. Nothing wrong with it.

But the folk music side of it is the kind of music that you learn by ear that you heard from a record or from a friend of yours on the street and all of the music that we’re hearing on the radio today. In the old days we didn’t have all these marketing devices to separate them all into genre like bluegrass or blues or rock ‘n’ roll. That’s all folk music.

I wouldn’t confuse folk music with the guy standing there with a guitar humming’ about the state of the world. You can do that in a death speed metal kind of way. You can do it in a glam rock way. I mean all of these different genres are all folk music because everybody learned to play it the same way.

And so the protest part of it is one small part that in some ways is purposely avoided by the entertainment industry. And so it has a political nature only because it’s been so difficult to get it on the air. Aside from that, the murder ballads of the 18th century or something like that, those kinds of songs were also chronicling the times. It didn’t have to be a political thing.

Or it could have been something making fun of somebody like “Yankee Doodle”. Those were political songs years ago. Now, it’s just a folk song that kids sing. It doesn’t have any relevance to anything. But you could get killed singing that thing a couple of hundred years ago!

Rick: You’re known as a master storyteller and I’ll add that you’ve got a great sense of timing. What’s it take to craft a good yarn and then get it to really capture people?

Arlo Guhrie: For me it’s just trial and error! [Laughs] You say something and sometimes people look at you with a blank look thinking, “What’s he talking about?” And when that happens over a period of time and it’s consistent then you just don’t say that anymore! You have a history of knowing what will actually work and be funny and engaging. I just keep it in my head. And I don’t think about it until I get to that same part of the story or that song. And that’s the way a great singer or guitar player learns to play.

And sometimes it’s funny or sometimes it’s powerful. It has all the nuances of the range of emotions that people have and when you’re able to practice it on live human beings a lot you develop a catalog of things you can do. You know a normal song goes by somebody’s mind real quick if you’re listening to it on the radio or live. But for the guy who’s singing it, he’s been there a couple of hundred times! The notes are a lot farther apart than when you’re listening to it the first time!

So every little nuance of what you’re doing can be practiced so that you’re working on levels that other people don’t even imagine or know exists. Because it becomes really big! I don’t know how to say it in words so much. It only takes two minutes to sing a two minute song, but if you sang that song a hundred times there’s a lot more minutes there to play with!

Arlo Guthrie – photo credit: Michael G. Stewart

Rick: More magnified for you?

Arlo Guhrie: Yeah, that’s a good word. Not just for me but for any guitar player who’s been working on a lick a long time. You know, the exact moment that you decide to bend a note or slide to it or walk to it or adjust to it. All these decisions that you can make are all finely tuned by people who are doing the same thing every night. And they just decided that, well, this one works better than that one.

Rick: What guitars do you own?

Arlo Guhrie: Well, I have more than I need! I use to have about two or three guitars that do different things. I also kept a 6-string and a 12-string around and a high strung National style guitar. Over the years people give you things and you think you want them or you go out and get them. So I’ve got one good Les Paul [1966], a Tele, one good SG. So I have all those kind of things.

I have a Flamenco style and classical style guitar and the normal steel string instruments that I play on stage. I generally keep a few of them with me because they either sound different or play different. Or just in case a string breaks on one I don’t have to sit there putting strings on.

Rick: Don’t you own a Gibson J-200 Vine?

Arlo Guhrie: Yeah, I do. It’s just a beautiful guitar. It’s a gorgeous instrument. I went out to Bozeman Montana and invited all the guys over from the Gibson factory. They just brought that over and gave it to me. I wasn’t looking for another guitar. That’s what I’m saying; you end up with more than you need!

I love the way it sounds. Even if you never saw it you’d say, “Boy that sounds like a great instrument!” And if you never heard it and looked at it, you’d say “Boy, that’s an awful pretty instrument!” So to get both of those in one is kind of rare.

I have an M-38 what they call a “Quadruple O” Martin 6-string that I’ve been playing since the ‘70s or maybe the early ‘80s. It was a prototype that they’ve been making fairly regularly from then on. And then whatever 12-string I can find, usually one of the Martin twelves I bring with me.

Rick: When Dylan went “electric” did that bother you like it seemed to bother other traditional folkies?

Arlo Guhrie: Personally I thought it was great! The first record I ever bought was the Everly Brothers. I love the Everlys. I mean they weren’t quite screaming electric or anything, but they definitely weren’t “On Top of Old Smokey” either. So, I never had a problem.

Like I said to you earlier, folk music for me has shot out in all of these different areas. But it’s all from the same trunk. You know, different branches from the same tree whether it’s screaming death metal, or punk rock bands or any other thing that’s come down the road, including Disco. I mean, that’s all folk music to me. So I have never cared where it went or what it did. I always just stuck to what I did best and I wasn’t going to venture into waters where I don’t swim very well.

I was thrilled to have Phil Everly sing with me on a record we did in the early ‘80s. I was just frozen in time. They had a TV show that I did with them many years ago that was really great. These were the first heroes I had in that kind of music.

So, Dylan playing electric guitar? I was more concerned about understanding what he was saying than what instrument he was playing!

Arlo Guthrie at Wolf Trap, VA – photo courtesy: Michael G. Stewart

Rick: What motivated you to start the Guthrie Center and what challenges did you have to overcome to make it into what it is today?

Arlo Guhrie: Well, the only reason we bought it was because the folks that owned it were selling it and because we’d made the movie there and I’d written the song “Alice’s Restaurant” and a number of other songs there.

I had a history of the building that was fairly well known and I thought that would be a great place to continue the spirit of my dad’s and my mom’s work in terms of providing a place for people to get together to talk about things in the world and to sing the songs that were being written. To do a number of other things and I thought if I could pull this off we’ll go ahead and do it. I couldn’t pull it off myself financially.

We asked for all of our friends and fans and neighbors to chip in and a lot of them did and we were able to put a down payment on the place. I think we’re still paying it off. But so far it’s been morphing into something different every year. And this year there’s a lot of music going on in the summertime.

There’s no heat or air conditioning in the major part of the building so we can only use it certain times during the year. There’s childrens’ shows going on, yoga classes and free lunches. A very wide range of things that interest me, all of which stem from some of the ideas and some of the philosophies that my mom and dad shared back years ago.